3 Answers
3

It's possible. In fact, you can share the swap space between completely different operating systems, as long as you initialize the swap space when you boot. It used to be relatively common to share swap space between Linux and Windows, back when it represented a significant portion of your hard disk.

Two restrictions come to mind:

The OSes cannot be running concurrently (which you might want to do with virtual machines).

Murphys law suggests that if you do this, you will one day forget, you will hibernate an OS, or boot it into a VM, and you will hose your system, and possibly data. Simple truth - disk space is dirt cheap, your data and work is probably not. Unless you are needing terabyte's of swap space for each OS, just make separate ones.
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Danny StapleJan 11 '11 at 9:57

One of my friends have tried this. He has installed five or six distros in a single Hard drive.

The first primary partition is for GRUB and he is able to boot to all the distros. The second partition is swap. The third partition is an extended partition and each of the distros is installed into their own logical partitions.

All of the distros are booting and can hibernate. I think you just need to make sure and select the correct distro after resuming from hibernation.

So, on the basis of his experiment I should say YES. This is possible.

But i think it can break things. What if distro 2 wakes up and distro 1's resume file
is using up the swap partition, what's the next thing going to happen?
So i too agree with all the above posts. Why dont you try to split the swap parttions, rather than taking this huge risk.